I consider myself a fairly design conscious person. I’m constantly thinking about the design process behind everything that’s around me, whether it’s a nice set of machined rearsets for my Ducati 749 or a t-shirt I’m about to slip over my head, what were the designers intentions and did they succeed? Alex and I, along with the rest of the team involved, have spent countless hours on the design of what will become eatsleepride.com, considering every single interaction and what it will mean to the overall experience for each user. From the moment someone arrives, what do they see, what do they feel and what are they going to do next? Their first taste of eatsleepride will come through our branding.
The process of branding eatsleepride has been challenging, but also great fun. The name itself was our first hurdle to clear. We went through lists and lists of names, until one day Alex excitedly said, “I think I’ve got it and the .com is actually available” (being a web based community, there was no question we needed a good URL, a real challenge these days). Eat Sleep Ride had a nice ring to it we thought, but more importantly we felt as though it was meaningful. These 3 words together signify a passion and devotion, a certain feeling that all bikers get when you just can’t imagine your life without motorcycles. The longer we worked with the name, the more we embraced it and there has never since been a question if we chose the right one.
Every great name needs a great logo, which brings me to the main reason for this post. While we’ve had a working logo for a while now, it was never intended to be a final design and was just something to use until we had a clearer sense of the brand. We recognize that one of our main challenges with eatsleepride is to remain “motorcycle agnostic”. We want to be a place for all motorcyclists regardless of whether you ride a hard tail custom chopper or are busy building a 75 foot freestyle ramp in your backyard, but let’s face it, there is a big difference between your average Harley rider and your average FMX rider… well, other than maybe we can all agree that tattoos should be part of the uniform. So, we had to avoid having any motorcycle images (what type of bike would we use?), we had to avoid designs that might fit with one crowd but not the other and we had to avoid the major manufacturer colour combinations.
We’re under no illusions that we will ever have a logo that everyone will like, but we hope it’s at least something that everyone can get on with. I’ll stop rambling now and just present the evolution of the logo:
My personal guide as to whether or not the new logo is good enough is to ask myself honestly, if I weren’t connected with this company would I wear a shirt with the logo on it? I answered, yes.
Tags: design · logo2 Comments
2 responses so far ↓
When I see talk of “branding” I know someone’s trying to sell me something. Is this a moneymaking venture?
Thanks for the great comment Stacy. You know, as soon as I typed the word “branding” while writing this, I thought, will people get turned off thinking it sounds too sales oriented? In the end, I left it as it was because, as I will explain further down, we want to be as transparent as possible about our intentions. Nonetheless, I will get right to your question. Yes, this is (hopefully) a moneymaking venture for us. Now that that’s out of the way, if you want to read on I can provide a bit more perspective on what we’re doing and why.
Without making this too long, we started this endeavor because we love motorcycles. Plain and simple, that is the most important thing to us. You can learn a bit more about this in the previous post http://eatsleepride.com/blog/2009/12/07/welcome-to-your-site/ .We feel that we are building something that will be a new and exciting way for motorcyclists to interact online — something that we would be happy to be a part of even if we weren’t involved. This has already and will continue to require money to make it all happen. So, we are working on a strategy to partner with appropriate companies and organizations that will enable us to have the funds to keep going.
You might be wondering what this partner strategy will mean to users of the site? First off, Alex and I hate getting assaulted by ads no matter what site we’re visiting. So, we intend to keep any advertisements as unobtrusive as possible and maintain a clean and enjoyable user experience for everyone. Furthermore, ads as well as any “corporate users” on the site will always be clearly identifiable as such (we won’t be parading ads as “regular site users” or anything of that nature).
As for the branding talk, branding is everywhere whether it gets called that or not. It’s most often discussed in the context of selling something, but it’s no different than a decision you or I might make when buying a new sweater — how will I look in this, what does it say about me? We want to make the best decisions we can for eatsleepride in order for us to attract users to help build a strong community and above all, make people feel good about being a part of it.